Goddard College Staff Strike Over Pay, Working Conditions

About 35 custodial, kitchen and administrative workers at Goddard College went on strike on Friday over their pay and working conditions. Patrick Burke, president of UAW Local 2322, the staff union, said negotiations hadn’t yielded the results the union is seeking, including a 3 percent cost-of-living raise.

“The college has been understaffed, and folks here have been overworked,” he said as striking staffers held signs in the college parking lot on a blustery afternoon. Workers are also unhappy that they don’t have enough say in the governance of the college, he said. They recently took a no-confidence vote in Dan Hocoy, who became Goddard’s president in July 2021.

“The ethos of the college is one of pretty radical pedagogy and progressiveness,” Burke said. “Not just the current president, but previous presidents as well, have not leaned into that strength.”

The Plainfield-based Goddard is an experimental, low-residency college, meaning students visit periodically to meet with faculty. An eight-day residency had just started on Friday as the strike got under way, a point Hocoy noted as he outlined the ways the action would affect operations on campus.

Thirty to 40 students were expected on campus, and about a dozen faculty members. The striking staff work in housekeeping, IT, the dining hall, the help desk, the library and the finance office, he said.

“It’s very irresponsible for them to strike now,” Hocoy said. “I don’t think it’s in the interest of our students, whose well-being and safety we are responsible for.”

Eighteen workers from Cabot Creamery board in a Goddard dorm.

Managers will be able to do some of the jobs, Hocoy said.

“We have a few people in academic affairs who will serve at the help desk; we have our chief finance and administration officer who will be doing payroll to make sure everybody gets paid,” he said.

Goddard has long struggled financially, and trustees hired Hocoy with hopes that he would turn things around. The college was recently on probation with the New England Commission of Higher Education due to concerns about its finances and governance. Enrollment at the college — which also has campuses in Port Townsend and Seattle, Wash. — was lower than expected in the fall, and there are now just about 340 students, Hocoy said.

Money is so tight that staff were asked to take a two-week unpaid furlough by the end of this fiscal year, in June. Hocoy said he worked through his furlough period.

“I haven’t taken any vacations,” he said.

Goddard has a budget of about $7.5 million and $2 million in reserves. Hocoy has been looking for revenue sources other than tuition and opened the college’s dining hall as a public café last summer. One building on the 117-acre campus is being rented out to an alternative middle school and another to the Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism.

Both sides of the negotiation feel the impact. Striking staff member Alisha Raby listed four one-person departments she’s running.

“I don’t even make $20 an hour,” she said. “ Granted, I accepted that gig, but I needed to get my foot in the door.

“I’m an alum, and I love this place dearly,” she added. “I want to move up and shine and be amazing, but I can’t pay my bills.”

The mood of the strikers was festive, despite the raw weather, with music, chatting and a lot of laughter. A bundled-up child sailed a large curled oak leaf on one of the large mud puddles, and union cochair Manuel O’Neill, a financial aid counselor, reminisced about his years of work at Goddard, where he first took a job in 1986. O’Neill was removed by one embattled president, Richard Greene, for his labor organizing, he said; Jane Sanders, who served as provost and interim president for a year after Greene resigned in 1996, hired him back.

“Wow, those were turbulent times,” O’Neill reflected.

Hocoy, who has weathered a barrage of criticism from faculty for his own governing style, said on Friday that he’s surprised the union doesn’t understand that Goddard can’t raise salaries right now.

“We have been very transparent with them about our financial predicament in light of the shortfall in fall enrollment,” he said. “There is no way for us to meet the demands in the state we’re in.”

Negotiations were slated to continue on Saturday, Hocoy said.

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